Hello everyone,

Exciting news. One of my best friends texted me tonight saying she has decided to go vegan for 7 days.

She said she is not sure she will be able to keep it up, but she is committed for 7 days.

At the end of the 7 days, will she decide to stay vegan???? I feel it is like when Beyonce and Jay z decided to go vegan for 30 days. I felt like the fate of the world was hanging in the balance. If they decided to stay vegan after their trial, maybe the world would quickly go vegan too!

They decided not to stay vegan. hehe.

That is why I decided to offer some help! In the form of this blog post.

Well, I have known my friend since the first day of college freshman year. We are very close. She is a friend who just gets me. In fact I had just been thinking minutes earlier in our texting how fun it would be if she got into fruitarianism and veganism too.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful for other people who are thinking of going vegan too.

I will try to boil it down to my best tips. Ok.

YOUR FIRST SEVEN DAYS OF VEGANISM

 

Step 1. Choose your Vegan Lifestyle.

Here are the options, as I see it. You could go:

1. Regular vegan.

This is how I did veganism the first time I tried it for about a year. Basically you just eat any and every food without meat, dairy or eggs. I ate a lot of french fries, veggie burgers and vegan burritos. This is a totally great plan to start off with. If you are on pinterest, simply type “vegan” into the search box, and you will find amazing pictures of incredible looking vegan food recipes you can make. Also, there are tons of delish special vegan foods to explore like Daiya cheese. You can make quesadillas with it, or vegan pizzas. It’s great! Also fake chik-en nuggets and what not…very good too.

The only problem with it is because this kind of vegan food is relatively high in fat you will probably not notice any noticeable weight loss effects or feel unnaturally amazing or different in any way. But at least you are helping animals and eating great tasting food all the time. There are tons of awesome vegan food dishes in the grocery stores and vegan restaurants and desserts to check out. I think this would be very easy to do for 7 days.

Yet, should you want to feel some real changes, there is the exciting option of:

2. Plant based vegan/ starch based vegan.

With this plan, you will probably lose a lot of weight long term like most everyone who tries it and possibly clear up some health problems that are plaguing you like happens to many who try it. This is the type of vegan lifestyle popularized by Dr. McDougall who wrote The Starch Solution and it was featured in the documentary Forks Over Knives about curing diseases through this lifestyle that doctors won’t tell you about. It’s on Netflix. Basically you eat a lot of starches, like beans, rice, potatoes, pastas, oatmeal, etc…but you cut out all oil from your diet.  The only problem is oil is basically hidden in every single food at a restaurant or in the stores so you end up not really being able to easily eat at restaurants. For this diet, you will have to do a little research to understand it better. I recommend the following to learn more about it:

-watch the documentary Forks Over Knives and read The Starch Solution if possible.

–potato strong’s recipes on his website. He has lost 30 pounds doing this lifestyle and is very helpful on Facebook in case you have any questions.

Though it will take a bit of research, this is an amazing life style for health and weight loss. I think this is a super great option. It is very filling. You get to eat all the carbs you want. It tastes great. And it is not hard at all!

But if you want to really experience some major shifts, you may be interested in

3. Raw till 4

MY PICK. This is what I do. When I started doing this form of veganism, my incurable cramps disappeared after only two weeks. Basically in this diet, you eat only fruit for breakfast AND lunch, and for dinner you make a starch based low fat vegan meal, like the things I mentioned above. The only difference is you keep it to your dinner time meal.

I highly recommend people try this option. You will experience the power of fruit! Fruit has the potential to heal the body. I don’t know why or how! I just know it works. At least it did for me, and for many others. Everyone owes it to themselves to at least try out the healing benefits of eating a LOT of fruit and see if anything happens for them on it.

Since this is my recommendation I will go into a little more detail about how to start off on raw till 4.

Ok. First you need a blender. Just buy one from a drugstore if you don’t want to invest in a vitamix yet. Vitamixes are amazing and won’t break but expensive. Hehe, I broke two blenders before I got the vitamix, but if you’re not making green smoothies, you’ll be fine.

Ok, so

For breakfast, make a fruit smoothie.

What I suggest doing is buying a ton of bananas. The ripest ones you can find in the store, like maybe they’ll even have spots on them already. You want the bananas to be spotted like a leopard. It will make a huge taste difference in your smoothies. But for my first two weeks of raw till 4, I didn’t know this, and ate unripe yellow bananas and I still got huge benefits and didn’t really mind it, cause I didn’t know any better yet.

So you have your bananas. Then buy some frozen raspberries or frozen fruit of your choice in the super market. Combine about 4 bananas with the frozen fruit of your choice and water, blend, and you will have an amazing breakfast.

For lunch, eat more fruit. Warning: You will really have to push yourself at first to eat more fruit, but it will be worth it.

This was the toughest part. You probably won’t want to eat any more fruit, but this is the fruit that is really gonna make the difference. It will be very tough at first to fathom eating MORE FRUIT. But this is the meal that is going to make you feel amazing. For lunch try having a meal of any fruit you like. Like, grapes or peaches or apricots or pineapple or whatever your fave fruit is. You will probably get full really quickly, so bring a lot more than you think you will want for later cause you will also get hungry really quickly. Your stomach hasn’t gotten used to eating lower calorie higher volume foods so it’s tricky in the beginning. Just know fruitarians eat ENORMOUS quantities of fruit so you can eat what to you will seem like INSANE amounts of fruit.

When I first started out I remember always being hungry because I would eat and then be hungry again in an hour. I wasn’t used to eating so much fruit and I physically couldn’t, so I wasn’t eating enough. It takes a while to perfect this. I would just continuously snack on fruit when you get hungry. Eventually you won’t need to do that though, but in the beginning, be warned! You won’t eat enough. The tricky thing about that is, when you get hungry you will get cravings for non vegan food, like cheese. Your body will send you to the highest source of calories it knows–like cheese…When that happens, force yourself to eat more fruit instead and your cravings will instantly disappear as soon as you eat the first bite. It is easy. And if they don’t disappear, eat more fruit till they do.

Ok on to dinner, the fun part.

For dinner, I suggest buying two bags of potatoes, and making potato strong’s potato recipes like mashed potatoes and gravy, no oil baked french fries, potato chips, or any of the awesome tasting recipes on his site.

You can even just get regular vegan food in the store or at a restaurant…if you don’t want to cut out all oil yet–(though it will make a huge difference if you do and you’ll instantly lose a lot of weight). Eat as much as you want for dinner and enjoy never thinking about calories or dieting again.

Then do it again the next day, and experiment with your smoothies and fruit.

Option 4 is to go totally RAW VEGAN or fruitarian which will give you superpowers but I don’t recommend going all in without practicing eating a lot of fruit on raw till 4 first.

Also, during the week, if you want to you can read some amazing books about veganism that will cement the whole ethical thing on a deep level.

1. Free the Animals by Ingrid Newkirk, head of PETA (amazing book, you will love it)

2. watch Toronto Pig Save’s videos (will make you understand on a gut level)

3. read any of the articles on free from harm’s website. So well written and very informative articles.

Also, follow some fruit lovers on instagram who post amazing fruit inspiration pics.

Some of my current instagram fruity faves are:

freeleethebananagirl

mypoortiredliver

lonijane

ellenfisher

essenaoneill

thebananachronicles

Lastly, enjoy the hilarious drama of the vegan community on youtube.

I recommend googling the entertaining channels of:

1. Ryan and Anji of Happy Healthy Vegan

2. freelee the banana girl

3. durianrider (freelee’s boyfriend)

4. fullyrawkristina

5. richiefruitbat

6. tannerbannaner (entertaining)

And to anyone reading, please anyone feel free to add other tips you can think of in the comments. I would be very interested to read your advice!

GOOD LUCK!!

Let me know how it goes!!

With light and love, as the hippies say :DDD

 

 

    

 

  before                                                                                 after

(scroll down to bottom for most recent photos)

Hello everyone,

It is getting to be my one year fruitarian/”plant based” eating anniversary.

I have been vegan and “high fruit” (i.e eating a ton of fruit) the whole time. But I was not doing a perfect job of “raw till 4” or “fully raw” or “vegan no oil” as they say at Whole Foods….the whole time. But I was always eating a lot of fruit and trying to live up to those ideals. So…yeah, not perfect, but…I think it takes some time to get it all right. I’m still learning about it all.

I remember I started in May last year. And now it’s May again.

Hopefully I don’t regret posting semi-clad pics of myself on the net.

So the before pictures that I took when I just started this lifestyle are very unflattering so I was scared to post them for a long time.

But what the heck. That’s what the before photo is all about.

Here you go:

BEFORE PICTURE

Ok now for one I took this morning.

AFTER PICTURE

(trying to be all “I AM YOGA GURU in HAWAII”)

Have I lost weight?

Let’s examine my physique more closely. ;)

Again I forgot to take the time to look presentable. But as Durian Rider and Freelee would say i’m being FULLY REAL. (as opposed to “fully fake”, which is what they call “fully raw” kristina–burn). (you can click on the photos to enlarge).

 

kind of freelee the banana girl, right?

(freelee the banana girl)

joking.

ok I took these a week ago too. For comparison with the before and afters.

AFTER

BEFORE

 

Ok i did it! I posted befores and afters. Now you can trust me when I talk about “fruit doesn’t make you fat” and all that.

My advice? Go raw till 4. (check it out on youtube) Watch freelee the banana girl’s vids and eat a lot of fruit and make potato strong’s recipes for dinner.

HAPPY THURSDAY!!

Here is an updated progress photo I took in July 2014, so two months after the last ones. It’s hard to tell month to month if you are losing anything, but over they year I think it really adds up:

September 2014, after one week of full fruitarian at the Woodstock Fruit Festival:

 

September 21, 2014, back to raw till 4:

 

 

December 4th, 2014: After a month of really loosening up on fruit and eating more starches, bread and more restaurant food. Have I gained? I really don’t know but I’m still on the path and that’s what counts. In addition, I still feel I look really great and have not noticed additional weight gain. Maybe even Lost!

 

June 2015